Frequently Asked Questions

School records come from the NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) for 2024-25 (directory, enrollment, grades, teachers, meal counts), with Title I status from CCD 2021-22, the last year NCES published it. District finance comes from the Census Bureau's F-33 school finance survey for fiscal years 2019 to 2023. Counselors, programs and discipline come from the Civil Rights Data Collection 2021-22, and chronic absenteeism from EDFacts 2021-22. Each page names the file and year under every figure.

A single rating hides which measure drives it. PlainSchools shows the underlying figures (enrollment, teachers, spending, programs, attendance) with their sources and places each school or district among others in its state, so you can weigh what matters to you. Lists name the one measure they sort by; the resource index is labelled as a measure of staffing, counseling, programs and attendance, not of teaching quality.

It is a school's enrollment divided by its full-time-equivalent (FTE) teachers in the same school year, from the CCD membership and staff files. Values under 3 or of 100 or more are treated as reporting errors and left out. A ratio counts every teacher, including specialists, so it is smaller than the typical class size.

On PlainSchools it is a district's current spending on elementary and secondary education (salaries, benefits, supplies, services) divided by its fall enrollment, both from the F-33 survey. It leaves out construction and debt, so it is lower than total spending per student. Districts are compared with districts of their own size in the same state.

The district finder takes a street address and names the school district whose boundary contains it; the district's page lists its schools by level. You can also search by school or district name, or browse by state and city. PlainSchools does not assign homes to schools: districts set attendance zones.

Public charter schools are included, because the CCD covers them. Private schools are not in the CCD and are not on PlainSchools.

School figures are from the 2024-25 CCD, released by NCES in 2025; district finance is from fiscal year 2023, the latest F-33 year loaded (fiscal 2024 was released on May 7, 2026 and is the next load). NCES publishes CCD school files about a year after the school year ends. The changelog records each data load.

Ethnicity percentages show the share of enrolled students in each NCES demographic category as reported by the school district. These categories follow federal guidelines: American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, White, and Two or more races.